Wednesday, February 27, 2013

The Black Dahlia is a 2006 historical mystery/thriller about the
infamous Black Dahlia murder in the 40s. However, you’d be hard pressed to
really find anything about the actual murder in this film, as this is a movie that
seems more preoccupied with…oh, just about everything BUT the goddamn murder.

I guess it’s based on a book from the 80s or something, and, hey, if
done well, a story like this could be potentially good. A sort of brooding
drama about the lives of two cops investigating the murder. Nothing wrong with
that in principle…but the thing is, The Black Dahlia is a horrible movie. It’s
been a while since a movie had me going ‘Just end! Just end already!’ after
every scene in my head. It’s also been a while since a script made me want to
strangle every single character in it and then light their bloated corpses on
fire, but hey, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Let me take you readers on a
journey now, through the pits of ineptitude capable by man…let me take you
through the horrendous well of never-ending suck that is The Black Dahlia.

Sigh.

We start off in the 1940s! Isn’t that amazing? They never let you
forget it; what with the constant sepia tone and the set pieces that come off
more like a high school production of a Sherlock Holmes story than anything
actually genuine. Every single set design, every character costume, every prop
is just screaming out ‘look at me! Look at me! I’m from the ‘40s! Really!’ Like
a little kid dressing up in a police officer costume on Halloween and then
later begging his mom to take him to McDonalds. Eugh.

But enough of that – let’s get to the main attractions here: Josh
Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart, playing two cops who are so cool that they hang out
chatting about boxing during riots and rebellions in the street. It’s a
flashback from the present time when Hartnett is getting ready to fight Eckhart
in the ring; sure. But seriously – we see all this cool stuff going on, all
this action, and what is Hartnett narrating about over top? “I really thought
it would be cool to have a boxing match with the guy from Suspect Zero.” That’s
crap and you know it, movie!

What this movie wants us to believe: scenes like the one above, packed with action and social intrigue, are worth skipping over and barely mentioning at all as part of the story...

...while THIS SHIT is considered top-dollar stuff! The cream of the crop! Pfft, get over yourself movie.

And that’s another thing that’s
really annoying in this movie…Hartnett’s butt-clenching awful narration, which
is about as convincing as a twelve year old doing a Marlon Brando impersonation
and editing it over the actual footage of The Godfather. It’s awful and
contrived and I hate it – moving on, then.

Gee, I’ve spent so much time on this movie already and I haven’t even
gotten to the main plot…well, what is the main plot? Well, Aaron Eckhart beats
the crap out of Josh Hartnett and then invites him to hang out with him and his
wife, because that makes a lot of sense, right? “Hey, I just knocked out
several of your teeth. Want to come hang out with my wife Scarlett Johansson,
so she can flirt with you while I’m not around? Yes? Awesome!”

Is that sepia tone getting irritating yet? Yes? Well, we're only 15 minutes into the goddamn movie. TRY SOME OTHER COLOR SCHEMES YOU HACKS.

Yeah, Scarlett Johansson plays Eckhart’s wife in this movie, and I
think it’s actually a really impressive performance. Not because of her actual
acting or anything; no – she’s about as convincing as a wooden plank would be.
But because it’s so damn obvious that she didn’t care at all when doing this
whole movie. She doesn’t even try to hide how much she doesn’t give a crap. You
can practically see her waiting to get back to her trailer and smoke a joint
after every scene she’s in.

It’s hilarious how Eckhart sees them dancing together at a party and
gets that squinty jealous, suspicious look in his eyes – dude, YOU INVITED HIM
TO YOUR HOUSE. How do you have any right to act jealous now?

"I get jealous even though I let my wife dance with random, attractive younger guys I physically bring home to her...I guess I'm kind of a dumbass."

I also love this one scene where Hartnett comes in and sees Johansson
stripped down to her underwear just standing there washing her face in the
sink. She turns around and sees Hartnett checking her out, and does nothing…uh,
how about closing the door, you goddamn bimbo? I know you really want to bang Hartnett
for no reason at all, but c’mon, be a little
more subtle about it! Since we know so little about her relationship with
Eckhart or even her as a stand-alone character, it’s hard to get invested in
crap like this, makes little sense, and is mostly more humorous than dramatic
or suggestive.

"Oh, closing the door is just so hard, especially when me and my husband made a new friend who apparently feels at home enough to just walk in at any time! But luckily I totally want his body for reasons only privy to hack screenwriters!"

Hartnett notices a big scar on her back that says ‘B.D.,’ which he uses
his masterful detective skills to figure out means Bobby DeWitt, who was some
pimp scumbag who she used to work for, who is currently in jail but getting out
soon. Hartnett muses on how people hurt women all the time and…has anyone else
noticed the big problem with this yet? They haven’t even talked about the Black
Dahlia murder at all! We sure get a lot of nonsense about boxing, about the
relationships between men at the police station and a lot of fluff about
Hartnett hanging out with Eckhart and Johansson and going to the movies…but
when your movie is called ‘The Black Dahlia,’ and you spend this much time on
very poorly written drama and exposition, hell, you can see how I’d be
disappointed! Just get to it already, you hacks! God, I’ve seen neighborhood
watch meetings that are more exciting than this movie.

So we get some crap about some mob boss guy who they have to go arrest,
and there’s some shootout. I guess there’s a minor subplot about the Black
Dahlia murder, which finally occurs,
but really, that’s just a minor side plot. Where’s the riveting talk about
boxing? We also really need more scenes with Scarlett Johansson flirting with
Hartnett behind her husband’s back. Who cares about the real, historical event
that the title of this movie is based on? Deliver the good stuff, movie!

But, yeah, all jokes aside, the murder finally happens, so we get some
scenes of Hartnett and Eckhart investigating stuff around town. They’re poorly
done and cliché scenes, sure, but at least at over 30 minutes into the movie –
yes, over 30 minutes in – we’re finally on the main plot. Baby steps, you know?

Scenes that have something to do with the Black Dahlia murder? Wow, I totally didn't expect that given the way this was going. It sure is an interesting sub plot, but when are we getting back to the main plot about romantic whining and cheating on husbands and boxing and stuff? This is pretty boring.

Hartnett, I guess, learns that there is some woman in Hollywood who
looks identical to the murdered girl, so off he goes, ever the super detective.
He meets up with the woman, who is played by Academy Award winning actress
Hilary Swank…anyone expecting a good performance out of this great actress will
be as disappointed as they were with the other big names in the film, as miraculously
director Brian De Palma managed to take a bunch of these huge actors and get
the worst performances possible out of each and every one of them. What a
perfect load of asinine horseshit. Swank’s character is a cardboard cutout of a
noir lady, only there to look hot in low-cut dresses and flirt with Hartnett in
a silly accent…charming, if you’re 13.

"I won two Oscars, and now I'm in this movie acting like I'm strung out on meth and happy pills at the same time. Life sucks."

To get him to hide evidence and keep her name out of reports, she
flirts with him and gets him to agree to come see her the next night, and he
accepts because he is the greatest detective ever…all great detectives take
bribes and are easily fooled by a pretty face! But while I was expecting a hot,
steamy sex scene, we get this:

That’s right, she invites him in to meet her parents, and the first
thing she shows him is a petrified dog. Apparently the dog was trained to fetch the
paper, and on one particular day, Swank’s daddy learned that he got a big
promotion, and so he shot the dog in place and left the newspaper in its mouth
to remember the occasion forever. And nobody seems to consider this at all
creepy, disturbing, morally wrong or an unholy abomination of nature! Anyone
with good sense would just turn the movie off right now, after this plus all
the other injustices to human decency this movie has, but not me. I hate this
movie far too much to let my viewing up to now go to waste by not finishing.
Let’s do this!

I love how Hartnett got suckered into an awkward date with her parents
there and everything…that’s priceless, and because this movie caused me so much
pain, seeing this gave me some vindictive catharsis. That pained look on his
face like “I was thinking we’d be having sex by now, not listening to your
lunatic father and horrible-acting mother” is just priceless. It’s not enough
to make up for the rest of the god-awful cinematic train-wreck, but at least it’s
something.

They do eventually have sex and everything, and it’s about what you’d
expect – pretty much just a space-waster to put some smut up on the screen, and
it doesn’t even last longer than half a minute or so. This movie is about as
erotic as watching a porno with your grandparents.

Have you forgotten about the mutilated dead girl in this movie yet?

So really, there isn’t a whole lot to say about the middle of the movie
because it’s just Hartnett and Eckhart going on a tour of the super obvious,
gratuitous 1940s settings with scowls on their faces while Hartnett narrates
overtop in his super-serious gritty detective voice – keep it up there, buddy,
maybe someday you’ll really sound halfway convincing! The movie even just stops for a bit to show us how cool the
1940s were by showing us their comically over the top set pieces:

THIS IS THE 1940S! THIS IS THE 1940S! Did you get that yet?! Didja?!?

Did I mention the obnoxious repetitive saxophone notes played throughout, as if to accentuate every other 1940s stereotype this movie could pile on? No? Well...it's obnoxious.

So, you may be asking, what’s going on with Aaron Eckhart’s character?
Yeah, I know you don’t give a shit about him in the least, but just pretend you
do and go with it. Apparently overnight he became obsessed and insane over the
Black Dahlia case and is now acting totally crazy all the time, shouting at his
wife and causing scenes at work. I love how, when he causes a scene at work,
Hartnett gets dragged in with him to get chewed out…seriously, why? It was
obviously only Eckhart who made any trouble! Do they just think Hartnett looks
cute or something?

And seriously – Eckhart being this crazy is not a good
sign. Have you guys seen the last time he got like this?

Not a happy time.

But really, though; this whole plot thread about Eckhart going crazy is
so poorly handled that I find it hard to believe that veteran Scarface director
Brian De Palma actually orchestrated it. There’s no segueway! There’s no
character development! He’s normal in one scene, then we cut away from him for
5 minutes, then the next time we see him, he’s raving mad. That’s beyond
third-rate screenwriting; that’s like seventh-rate screenwriting! Somebody send
this writer back to college and teach him how to write a proper goddamn story.
Shit. What’s his name; Josh Friedman? And he hasn’t written anything else since
this movie? Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me very much!

There’s one scene where his wife Scarlett Johansson explains that he’s
so gung-ho because he lost his kid sister when he was younger, and so now any
murdered girl reminds him of her. For one…that’s retarded. And two, really, a
one-line explanation is a serviceable character development now? Go to hell,
movie.

Anyway, apparently that DeWitt guy from earlier is being released now.
Since The Black Dahlia is allergic to having scenes involving the actual Black
Dahlia, we get a fight scene between him and Eckhart. There’s a struggle, and
DeWitt ends up dead, but then a mysterious figure also slits Eckhart’s throat
and kills him, too, throwing him over the balcony.

"I'm so glad I'm finally out of this movieeeeeeeeeeee!" *splat*

Johansson is so broken up about her husband’s death that she and
Hartnett start making out almost immediately afterwards:

Look how sad they are! They're just broken up over Eckhart's death!

What a two-timing slut-whore. I guess dead husbands turn her on? This
seriously pisses me off, and for that to happen when I’ve already had my brain
melted by the rest of this movie’s mind-numbing insanity and stupidity is a
pretty big feat. Bitch, your husband just died! I know nobody in this movie can
show any kind of emotion beyond over-done melodramatic whining, but come on!
How am I supposed to be invested in a character that just shrugs off the death
of her husband like five minutes after it happens?

No, literally, it’s instantaneous. He gets killed, Hartnett looks sad,
he goes over to her house and they talk about it for like a minute, and then
they’re making out. It’s not even like grief sex, either; no; the next morning
they’re snuggling and smiling and talking about what to make for breakfast. WHAT
PLANET AM I ON? This is despicable and low even for this shitty ass movie! I
hope Josh Friedman or the author of the book or whoever the hell authored this
crap gets a rude awakening one day when they realize the ramifications of loss
can’t be solved by shacking up with your buddy’s grieving spouse the very same
day. Ugh.

Look at all that heavy grieving they're doing!

Okay, whatever, so it’s revealed that Johansson was keeping stolen
money from this drug deal that Eckhart was helping to cover up, which is why he
killed one of the guys in that shootout earlier. This plot thread is pointless
and largely evokes a yawn from the audience, but it does get Hartnett back into
the loving arms of Hilary Swank’s character! Because that’s really what I wanted to see! More running around to
unlikable female characters for contrived, ridiculous melodrama! Why isn’t this
god-forsaken movie over yet? It’s like torture! This should be used as a
torture device on terrorists at Guantanamo! If you won’t close it down, Obama,
at least make the best use of it possible!

So it’s then revealed that it may have been Hilary Swank’s character’s
father who killed the Black Dahlia girl, because…he was in the house when she
was making a pornographic lesbian film? I really don’t know, and I really don’t
care. Two seconds later, we find out that this was all a red herring, and that the
father didn’t do it, but the MOTHER did! Yeah, great suspense there, movie.
That was, what, maybe a minute or two at most that we thought it was the father
who committed the crime? Well, I was just on the edge of my seat, I say!

Whenever someone tries to tell you this is a good movie...just show them this face, and they'll shut up right away. And seriously, this lady's performance is just amazingly awful. If she didn't get awarded a Razzie for this I'll be very surprised.

But yes. This movie just solved the Black Dahlia murder. Isn’t that
amazing? Isn’t that just so smart and revolutionary? 60 years of policework
couldn’t do it, but a hack screenwriter like Friedman and the doofus who wrote
the book can! I am just so blown away
by this amazing twist! So blown away
that I want to know more! Tell me, movie, why did Hilary Swank’s mother kill the Black Dahlia?

Well, apparently it’s because the Black Dahlia looked like Hilary Swank’s
character. That’s really all we get. That’s the big reveal – she killed the
girl because the girl looked like her daughter. How did she even get away with
doing it right there in the yard? I dunno! The movie didn’t plan that far
ahead. Well, I extend my middle fingers as high as they will go straight in the
direction of this festering disease of a movie, this horrible collection of clichés and
overdone melodramatic tropes!

That’s The Black Dahlia, and it----

What? WHAT? WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S NOT OVER YET?! I still have more of
this torture to sit through? Oh, God! Why? Why?!

So what, it’s revealed that Hilary Swank actually killed Eckhart
earlier? Hartnett responds to this by shooting her and killing her right in her
hotel room where they had sex earlier. He then goes back and gets together with
Scarlett Johansson again and sees the Black Dahlia’s murdered, mutilated body
lying on the ground in a vision, I guess symbolizing that he’s still thinking
about the case. But like the movie as a whole, he just shrugs off the real,
historical, UNSOLVED murder and goes inside to have more sex with Scarlett
Johansson. Isn’t that just so perfect for this ass storm of a movie?

Hey, the sepia tone is gone! IT'S A MIRACLE!

"We can forget about this because it was never the main point of this movie and doesn't even deserve mentioning again. No, what's really important is that a man-slut cop gets together with a lying, horrible bitch who got over the death of her husband by having sex with his best friend five minutes after it happened. Truly she seems like the best person to be with!"

What they don’t show you is
the police finding Swank’s dead body and throwing Hartnett in prison for
murdering her. They don’t show you him getting ass-raped in prison for the rest
of his life while Johansson’s character becomes a single mother and can’t give
her unborn child a good life. They don’t show you those things, which would be
a good thing in most movies. But I hated this movie so much, hated all of the
characters, hated their reactions to every situation…I hated everything in this
film so much that I WISHED we had seen that shit!

The Black Dahlia is just uuuuggggghhhhhhhh! I can’t even describe it in
a proper English word, it’s so horrendous. Everything about this film is just
painful, from the tacky sets and costumes to the convoluted plot and the
horrible, unlikable characters. And it’s a shame, because some of these actors
like Aaron Eckhart actually did try
to make something good out of this, even in spite of the hack-work script, and
even De Palma tries to conjure up some atmosphere with the admittedly decent
camerawork. But nothing can salvage this botched up movie. The whole concept of
introducing a romance subplot into a detective murder plot is iffy enough, but ending the movie on it is just creepy
when you really think about it. It’s like, hey, here’s a story where a young
girl got cut in half and mutilated beyond recognition…aren’t you glad it ended
with a happy couple getting together? That just doesn’t work at all.

And the crowning jewel of awfulness has to be the fact that they solved
the unsolved Black Dahlia murder, and not only that, but gave it such a weak
and unimpressive story! All they could come up with was ‘she was killed because
some mother thought she looked like her daughter’? Bullshit! That’s so
anti-climactic it almost rewinds the entire movie back to the beginning. Which
is a fate that nobody deserves. You really can’t just do that – resolve things that were actually unsolved in history.
And if you do, you have to have godly writing skills to back it up and make it
work for the story, make it plausible. So The Black Dahlia is a failure on
pretty much every level, and I hate everything about it. I hope this movie
burns in the lowest depths of cinematic hells imaginable!

The pictures in this review belong to their original owners. I do not own any of them.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Nazi films have taken the path of bad horror franchises. At first, they
were legitimately heartfelt and dramatic, with real weight to them – like
Schindler’s List, American History X and Defiance, among numerous others. Then they went down the path
of self-parody, as Inglourious Basterds shows us. It got even stupider when we
introduced zombie Nazis into the mix, much like various franchises introduced
lackluster and often stupid premises. And with Iron Sky, the Nazi film genre
has gone completely off its meds and into cartoony nonsense.

I mean it, people;
this has to be the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Nazis on the moon. That’s
all you need to know about the plot – Nazis on the friggin’ moon. How could
this idea possibly produce anything above wall-banging inanity and drooling
ineptitude? It can’t. It really can’t, but hell, God knows it tries anyway.
Iron Sky, people!

We start off with, what else? Nazis on the moon. We see a couple of
American astronauts bumbling around on the moon, barely able to stand up – hur
hur, look at the dumb Americans! – when they come across the Nazi moon base.
The Nazis kill off one guy, but capture the other one and take him prisoner for
some reason – why don’t they just kill him too? Because otherwise there would be no movie, and Lord knows a world without this would truly be a world that nobody would want to live in.

Meanwhile on the moon base, we see Richter, a super-hot Nazi babe
teacher who tells the class to talk in English and review how their moon colony
came to be: apparently it’s about what you’d expect; they escaped to the moon
and are planning to come back and take over the Earth. That’s all we get, and
only then so the audience will know what’s going on. Isn’t that just amazing
screenwriting? When you just flat out have the characters say the backstory
exposition-style in a few lazily done lines? And for that matter, there are a lot of holes in this story. How did the
Nazis escape to the moon at all, without anyone noticing? Did they just point
over the world’s shoulder and go “LOOK! The imminent threat of a Cold War!” and
then run away in a puff of smoke, like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon?

"Now I'm going to teach you kids how to bake Swastika-shaped cookies!"

So it’s revealed that the astronaut they captured is a black man, and
since the Nazis are a pure Aryan race, they’ve never even seen a black person.
Hell, they don’t even know black people exist. They just think there’s “something
wrong with his skin.” That’s just charming, isn’t it? He tries to plead with
them by throwing out all the random German words he knows, like Volkswagen and
other dumbass American things to say. Because, as this movie will reinforce
time and time again, Americans are all friggin’ idiots with no dignity or class
at all, with no exceptions whatsoever.

He manages to disarm all the guards, though, and escapes easily. Uh,
I’m sorry, how have these guys been
self-contained for years with no problems? They get their asses kicked by the
first guy they catch! For an unstoppable military force they’re pretty wimpy…these
guys ought to be mall cops, not soldiers of the Fourth Reich on the moon!
Sheesh.

Anyway, he somehow gets teamed up with that Richter chick and
accidentally opens up a gate that will suck them all out into the breathless
void of space…

I just love how in every single bad movie ever set on a spaceship, the main characters OF COURSE hit the very convenient switch on the wall that opens up a vacuum into the deadest reaches of space. Like, why put it there unattended at all? Wouldn't it make more sense to just put it in a 'BREAK GLASS IF NEEDED' case like a fire alarm, so that stuff like this doesn't happen every other day? I guess I just don't get the incredible complexities of space nazis.

…it happens! They’re not incompetent, really!

While they’re trying to hang on for their lives, all of Richter’s
clothes blow up and leave her mostly looking like a Nazi porn star (see pic above). Nazi pornography definitely isn’t what I thought I’d
see when I woke up this morning. If it turns you on, great! But if I see a buff
looking stud with the acting talents of Jean Claude Van Damme on horse
tranquilizers stumble in and ask this girl to heil his Hitler…I’m out of this flick faster than you can say Nazisploitation.

Meanwhile on Earth, the president of the United States certainly doesn’t look anything like a certain much-maligned
political figure from a few years ago…

she hangs out in the Oval Office in sweatpants and workout clothes and does nothing but run on a treadmill all day, while promoting insane propaganda to the masses - HA! How clever of them? No, it's mostly just retarded.

…oh, screw sarcasm; it’s a frigging Sarah Palin reference. It’s so
blatant you might as well just flat out have her talk about seeing Russia from
her backyard and spoiling her kids with the campaign money and everything. It’s
so 5 years ago though! Who makes jokes about Sarah Palin anymore? This is a
2012 movie? Please…I’ve seen more subtle humor in Jim Carrey movies.

So back on the moon, the Nazis tie up that black guy, whose name is
James Washington by the way, and force him to listen to loud and annoying
German radio broadcasts in an attempt to turn him into a Nazi. He delivers some
truly cringeworthy lines that you can really see cause the actor pain. I mean
it’s bad; it’s really, really bad. Calling a bunch of Nazis “homey” and using
words like “trippin’” isn’t exactly the height of diplomatic relations
intelligence, you know. It’s not really the kind of thing the US would pride
itself on.

So they turn him into...

…aw, God, really? That looks like what would
happen if a snowman and a horribly wet, bedraggled cat fused together into one horribly misshapen abomination.
It’s horrendous! If this doesn’t appear in your nightmares tonight…you are a
braver man than I.

Oh, and what’s this? A reference to Dr. Strangelove? I’m sure Stanley
Kubrick would be proud, yeah. Because this movie and Dr. Strangelove are on the
exact same level of comedic wit. Why do I get the idea this is like a monkey
paying homage to the works of William Shakespeare?

James, Richter and their commander, Adler, end up going to Earth to
meet the President and get into shenanigans that got old in the 80s, retreading
ground that isn’t even retro right now; just lame. Is this movie really pulling the whole 'strange looking aliens try to approach a bunch of black dudes playing ball' thing? I thought that shit died 20 years ago. But I guess not. Somehow they find the person
they’re looking for in a second: this one chick who has some serious anger
problems who seems to run the space missions. They kidnap her and kick James out of the
truck, leaving him homeless on the streets.

They interrogate the woman they kidnapped who says she’ll bring them to
the President, which she does, promising that they can help her win the
election. The President sees the opportunity, too, and starts using Richter’s
speeches as her own, which gets a lot of good press. Ha ha. Implying that the
current American population is so dumb that they’d fall for the same mistakes
that Nazi Germany did back in the day? That’s…actually a little bit clever.
It’s not genius or anything – for it
to be, we’d have to really see more of the context
this world exists in – but it’s a little funny, I’ll give the movie that.

But here’s something that’s not – we fast forward three months ahead
and see that James is now a hobo on the streets and the Nazis are involved in
the upper class politics. So how is that a big difference from before the time
lapse? Everything seems to be pretty much the same.

We see that one chick trying to get it on with Adler, who rejects her
because his first love is and always will be the Fuhrer. How heartbreaking.
He’s about to call his Nazi buddies when they just show up there…somehow…I’m
really not sure how. There’s a lot of boring dialogue and, long story short, he
kills his leader and takes over the position himself. He then calls in all his
forces to come and attack the Earth, prompting an all-out war. Hooray, violence
and destruction!

This still from the new Die Hard movie brought to you by Iron Sky.

The President is happy because “wartime presidents always get elected
for a second term.” Isn’t this political satire just the best? Isn’t it so
subtle and understated?

They all end up on the moon somehow, and the movie is trying to force
upon us a contrived romance between a sheltered Aryan woman from the moon and a
man who has been turned into a slightly slimmer version of the Yeti from Ice
Age:

Because, yeah, that's a romance that really brings a goddamn fire to my heart. When I think of great romances in cinema I will think of this. Hell, thinking of these two in the bedroom? Totally hot.

Charming, yet again. The US and the rest of the world launch all their
spaceships…yes, they all have spaceships now…and fire on the Moon. The US ship
is led by that one chick who got rejected by the crazy Nazi, Adler, from
earlier – she now wears a costume so stupid that even the worst Power Rangers
villains would scoff at it.

I...just...no; I can't take that costume seriously. Every time she's on screen the mood is totally ruined. It's not even funny so much as embarrassing...and I don't get her character arc at all; she got rejected by that Adler nazi guy and so she turns crazy psycho war-bitch on us? It's totally forced, and makes no sense.

To make a long story short, Adler gets axed by Richter, and James
fights off a scientist who looks like Albert Einstein’s retarded cousin, and is
about as nuts as all that, too. Meanwhile on Earth, the world leaders discover that
the Moon Nazis actually have had a resource called Helium-3 for years now that
could have made energy infinitely sustainable on Earth, and…what breaks out is
honestly one of the funniest images I have seen in ages, as the world leaders
start jumping out of their seats and pummeling the shit out of one another:

Okay, that's pretty damn cool. If the whole movie was just cut out and this was given to us as a minute-long animated short, I'd give it five stars out of five.

On the Moon again, it turns out even though the colony just had the
shit bombed out of it by the entire world’s space militia, mostly everyone is
OK! I guess the US had their nukes set to 'safe' mode. They all wake up just in time to witness the whole reason this movie
existed at all, their first sight of a white woman kissing a black man:

Hooray, two characters we don't give a shit about are together at last! My heart soars.

That’s right, James turned himself black again. How did he know what to
do, being that he’s not in any way a scientist and had no formal training with
any of the equipment in that crazy laboratory? Ssssshhhh.

We end on a very odd image of the sun shining through the hole in the
moon and…blacking out cities on the Earth.

What is that supposed to mean? What
does it have to do with the rest of the story? I dunno! Hey, for that matter,
seeing as this movie is supposed to be set in 2018, how is it even an election
year at all? It would only be halfway through a term for the 2016 presidential
elect! Do the people behind this just not know basic math? You know, I’m
starting to think this movie is just crap.

I guess it had a few funny moments here and there – sometimes the
satire, while heavy handed and rather stupid, actually did get a laugh or two
in spite of that fact, and I enjoyed the manic energy everything had –
certainly nothing felt boring. But Iron Sky is just too shallow to really be a
genuinely good film. It doesn’t go
deep enough with its themes and isn’t particularly clever or witty, and the
jokes are all pretty passé and banal. It’s entertaining at times, and not
everything about it is bad, but calling it a legitimately good flick is a
stretch. The plot holes are too abundant and the story is mostly squandered in
favor of silly slapstick and dated, tired humor that nobody will get in five
years’ time. If you really want to see Nazis on the moon…well, this is the
movie for you. The rest of us can safely pass on this.

Friday, February 15, 2013

People are really just like pinballs bouncing off one another in an
aimless digital age, and what is there really to serve as a point to it all
besides what we make for ourselves? Everything is digitized, everyone is
trapped between walls and nobody has a clue what they are doing with their
lives day to day, let alone in the bigger picture. What is there to it all?
What are we but bags of flesh drifting through silicon and rust-carved cities
doing jobs robotically and losing our souls day by day? Where is the light?

Well, I don’t know. But I do know that this is a great piece of cinema,
which tackles a few of those questions.

Sidewalls is a Spanish film about a
guy, Martin (Javier Drolas) and a girl, Mariana (Pilar López de Ayala) who live
next to one another and lead strikingly similar, dissonant and disappointing
lives. And they’re basically perfect for one another! But they’ve never met,
and in the big city what chance is there of that, anyway?

This is just a magnetizing film, and I was hooked from the start.
Everything in this movie is whitewashed and grey, and the cityscape is vast and
mechanical. The two main characters are often pictured from far away in big
crowds, or among other people. Everyone in this movie seems terribly alone. We
see them both try to connect with people and go on dates and we see them fail,
simply because people so rarely ever do anything else in the grand scheme of things.
Sadness is normal, happiness fleeting – as it should be, lest we forget the
worth of happiness. Sidewalls portrays these themes by showing us a series of
vignettes about Martin and Mariana just trying to get by in every day life, to
find connections.

There’s a lighthearted grace to this movie, mostly in the wry
narrations, that makes it a real pleasure to watch – these are some of the best
narrations I’ve seen for a movie in a long time. I love the little things in
this movie like Mariana’s obsession with Where’s Waldo books – you will believe
that she can make Where’s Waldo into something poetic and profound. There are tons of these moments in Sidewalls;
these little moments, visually and writing-wise, that stun and warm the heart,
and it would be a disservice of me to list them here when you can go discover
them for yourself.

Sidewalls is just a great romance film, as well as a great commentary
on our digital age and the ramifications it’s had on socialization and romance.
It’s a masterwork of directing, with a ton going on visually in addition to the
great script. Despite its disparate setting and drab colors, there is never a
dull moment on screen and everything seems vital and life-affirming. This is
very much a movie of progress and change, as it starts out pretty bleak, but by
the end it shines with newfound life. The two actors are both excellent and
portray their characters so well they might as well be second skins, and the
script is so good it’s chilling – a masterpiece of connecting human being to
fellow human being. I felt in tune with the human spirit after watching this,
and that’s as high a compliment as I can give.

This movie is on Netflix, so you really have no excuse to go watch it
right away. Fans of Lost in Translation and similarly down-to-Earth love
stories will eat this up, but really this is just an essential film for anyone
who wants to see something beautiful and affecting about people who’ve lost
their ways finding them again. People are lost all the time, and maybe life
doesn’t have any meaning at all, but anyone who can make a film like this is
close to tunneling a light through the darkness. Magisterial and powerful, yet
also sensitive and entertaining.